Self-portrait

Around 1630 Francesco Cairo was a young painter in Lombardy making his name with small cabinet pictures of a distinctly morbid kind, swooning saints, martyrs, severed heads, faces caught between agony and rapture. He painted this self-portrait in roughly those years, before the steadier fame that later made him a knighted court painter to the dukes of Savoy in Turin. The same restless, shadowed mood he gave his suffering saints hangs here over his own young face, lit against a dark ground with nothing to distract from the look he fixes on the viewer.